Debug system having assembler correcting register allocation errors

Abstract

An assembler, which can be provided as part of a debugger and / or development system, avoids register allocation errors, such as register bank conflicts and / or insufficient physical registers, automatically.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] Not Applicable. STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH [0002] Not Applicable. FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0003] The present invention relates generally to programming devices and, more particularly, to assembling source code to generate machine code. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0004] As is known in the art, some processors have multiple register banks from which operands are fed to a processing unit that performs a designated operation, e.g., shift, add, subtract etc. A first bank of registers provides operands to one port of the processing unit and the second bank of registers provide operands to a second port of the processing unit. While this arrangement has certain advantages, operands for a given instruction cannot come from the same bank of registers. [0005] In some known assemblers, the programmer typically writes instructions using physical register names (e.g. RO) rather than virtual names (e.g., num_packets), so that re...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

While the ability to use virtual names provides certain advantages, such as ease of use, register bank conflict issues may become more of an issue.

A further issue that can arise in the assembly of source code can occur when the number of physical registers required by the code exceeds the number present in the target hardware.

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